20 October 2016

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia PlathThe Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar, I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order.

McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last stop on her road to recovery from her suicide attempt in August 1953. She initially recovered at the Newton-Wellesley Hospital. Paul Alexander writes that she was at Newton-Wellesley from 26 August until 3 September at which point in time she was moved to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He then states that Plath moved from MGH to McLean in Belmont eleven days later on 14 September. The fullest autobiographical account of Plath's summer and suicide attempt can be read in her 25 December 1953 to Eddie Cohen. She never sent letter. In this letter Plath claimed to have spent "two sweltering weeks" at Newton-Wellesley Hospital before spending two weeks in the psychiatric ward at Massachusetts General. This particular letter is fairly candid and glib, so she may have been being generic with regards to the duration of her her various hospital stays.

Little is known about this entire period. Some information I learned from an envelope in Plath mss II at the Lilly Library. The back of an envelope, that once contained a letter from Gordon Lameyer to Sylvia Plath and which was postmarked 1 September 1953, contains two full-lipped lipstick blots. I was enraptured by this before realizing it also held notes about visiting the MGH. The notes, transcribed below following the line breaks on the back of the envelope, read:

Dr. Racioppi is Dr. Francesca M. Racioppi Benotti, the Plaths' family doctor who practiced under her maiden name Francesca M. Racioppi, M.D. Her office, which opened in 1947, was located at 152 Washington Street, Wellesley.

In the first set of shorthand symbols four lines from the bottom, "ment" is a best guess. It might very well be "main", which contextually makes more sense. It also "looks" similar to the word "main" as defined in this shorthand dictionary (see page 130).

My deepest thank to Jeffrey Mifflin, archivist at Massachusetts General Hospital, and to Catherine Rankovic for her assistance with "translating" the shorthand. Visit Catherine's blog, Studying Aurelia Plath, to learn about Aurelia Plath, shorthand, and more.

Back to McLean… I knew Plath stayed at Belknap House in McLean Hosptial. It was listed as the return address in the letter to Eddie Cohen mentioned above and printed, though edited down, in Letters Home (pp. 129-132). However, there are two Belknap's: North Belknap and South Belknap. I arbitrarily decided (or read somewhere, maybe?) that it was North Belknap. Or, it is possible that I simply mis-remembered which house she was in if the name was printed in a book or article. My conclusion, however wrong, was also not only based on what I saw, but on Plath's description in The Bell Jar, Chapter 15:

My room was on the first floor, and the window, a short distance above the pine-needle-padded ground, overlooked a wooded yard ringed by a red brick wall. If I jumped I wouldn't even bruise my knees. The inner surface of the tall wall seemed smooth as glass. (1963: 197)

North Belknap has, in the front of the house, a red brick walled courtyard. It was the most visible and approachable house on my first, timid visits.

Walled-in courtyard of North Belknap

The quote from the novel above comes right when Esther Greenwood moves from the "City Hospital" (aka Massachusetts General in Boston) to the private hospital. Based on the chronology of the novel and the way things worked in the real world, Plath, like Esther Greenwood, was likely first admitted to Codman House, the model for Caplan in the novel. We know Esther herself was in Caplan for she says in Chapter 19: "I often thought if I had been assigned to Doctor Quinn I would be still in Caplan or, more probably, Wymark" (1963: 236).

However, in doing the final research preparations for the tour, I learned that back in the day there was Men's Belknap and Women's Belknap and that modern day McLean has different names for these houses. Men's Belknap is now North Belknap and Women's Belknap is now South Belknap. This is extremely useful to know as we have a clear idea of where Plath was during a time in which little information (no journals, sparse letters) is known. Therefore, the quote from Chapter 15 above most likely describe Codman/Caplan.

The hierarchy of houses and how they link to The Bell Jar is as follows: Women's/South Belknap (freest and the model for Belsize), Codman (medium security, for lack of a better way to put it, and the model for Caplan), and Wyman (lockdown, the model for Wymark; see Pressman, Last Resort, 247). In addition, Pressman states: "Within each building the floors were also rated, from I to III ('I' being lowest), further differentiating the levels of disturbance" (247). We can deduce that because Esther was on the ground floor that she was not deemed a serious threat. At McLean, Wyman and Codman were tucked further back into the woods from the main entrance and center of the grounds. As Esther Greenwood goes, in Chapter 17, to receive electroshock therapy, she describes the journey:

Then Doctor Nolan unlocked a door at the end of the hall and led me down a
flight of stairs into the mysterious basement corridors that linked, in an elaborate network
of tunnels and burrows, all the various buildings of the hospital. (1963: 225)

Many of these tunnels, constructed between 1893 and 1895, are visible. Some are burrowed into the ground, some have an above ground pathway that parallels its more secretive interior.

Tunnel near Codman House

Tunnel connecting South Belknap to Administration Building

Tunnel near Centre Building

Esther had two rooms in Caplan. The first room was at the back and was described above; the second room was in "the front of the house" and had "lots more sun" (1963: 204). Caplan's original, Codman House, is no longer in use. It is boarded up and abandoned and heavily overgrown with weeds and foliage. The front of the house faces south so in the late fall and winter, it would receive all the sunlight on any given day. I walked around the area and took some "safe" photographs.

There are a few maps of the grounds available. This one from circa 1900 is really useful. As is the Belmont Assessor Plans from 1931, much closer to Plath's time. In this section map you can clearly see walled in areas behind both Women's Belknap as well as the front of Codman and in the rear at the back (just above "man" of "Codman").

Bing and Google Maps offer various current perspectives on the houses. I found the Bing maps better for the south facing side of Codman House as the leaves were off the trees and it was before it was so overgrown due to abandonment.

Bing Map showing main entrance and part of a tunnel.

Bing Map showing back side of Codman house, and woods.

Once I found out about the older/original name for South Belknap, I found the following images of Women's Belknap from 1903 via the Harvard Art Museums website. These provide truly enlightening glimpses at the decor of McLean in 1903 and supplies information about the geography of the house and its rooms.

10 October 2016

In the past two months I have been doing a lot of research into Sylvia Plath's first suicide attempt on 24 August 1953. Maybe this is a morbid topic over which to obsess? However, I feel that it is an very fascinating topic and fortunately, somehow, I am able to not get too emotional over it.

As a part of this research, I put online scans of all the articles I have found that covered Plath's suicide attempt. There are more than 200! I hope that you all use this resource; that you enjoy it and benefit from it. In processing all those files, and re-reading them, I grew more and more intrigued with the finer-point details presented in the 1953 articles themselves, in the biographies, in articles, and, of course, in Plath's wonderful novel The Bell Jar. A lot of my querying was further encouraged by my recent tour of Plath's 26 Elmwood Road, Wellesley, house.

This got me wondering if the Wellesley Police Department might have any archival record of their role in searching for Plath. So I wrote to Kelly Dias, the records manager, and in a very short time she sent me the following images from one of their log books. As they are public records she gave me her blessing to post them here.

At 5:30 pm on 24 August 1953, Mrs. Plath called the Wellesley Police to report her daughter missing.

I was hopeful to see interview notes, notes summarizing police activities, and possibly photographs. But these things seemingly do not exist; or exist no longer.

As far as I am aware no previous biographer worked with these document but they do present the most accurate timeline for those days. When things happened. The minutes, in fact, that logged phone calls were made from Mrs. Plath to the police. You will remember that on the afternoon of 24 August 1953, Mrs. Plath saw the film A Queen is Crowned at the Exeter Street Theatre on Exeter and Newbury Streets in Boston's Back bay. She would have gotten home sometime around 4 pm and waited at most 90 minutes before starting the search for Sylvia Plath.

01 October 2016

Although the announcement was made several days ago and nearly broke the internet... I am really pleased to post on the blog that Director of Special Collections and University Archivist Lara Wilson and Grants and Awards Librarian Christine Walde of the McPherson Library at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, have invited me to give a lecture on Sylvia Plath. That is the second longest sentence recorded in history (see Henry James).

On 27 October 2016, at 4:30 pm, I will be giving a talk entitled: "'She wants to be everything': Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Letters, and Archives".

Here is the brilliant, sleek looking poster they made up for the event, which is helping to celebrate 50 years of the University's Special Collections.

This is Sylvia Plath on Mount Monadnock, New Hampshire, from circa 17 July 1954. The photograph is from the Lameyer mss, Lilly Library, Indiana University at Bloomington.